by Elio
Student blogs there are that gladden an old man’s heart. Here’s a sampling.
In Catalogue of Organisms, Christopher Taylor, a student of arachnids in Perth, Australia, posted a new interpretation of the mysterious Prototaxites — giant, 8 meter tall fossils some 400 million years old that predate any plants of that size. It was thought that these megastructures were fungi (see our post on this). It has now been proposed that they are sheets of liverworts that rolled up as they cascaded down slopes. Christopher points out things that may be wrong with this scheme.
In Skeptic Wonder, Psi Wavefunction, an undergraduate in British Columbia, takes on the term “Oncogene” and explains why it should disappear forever. Her writing is so lively that we published a guest post by her recently.
In Micro Writers (“written by students to students”) that comes to us from Cairo University, Mariam points to the wisdom of escaping from anthropocentric to biocentric microbiology. This post is based on a commentary by Ramy Aziz published in Gut Pathogens that was highlighted on our blog not long ago.
In Extreme Biology, students post about "anything biology-related." These students have not yet graduated from high school! To our delight and awe, Amy Ciardiello, a 9th grade violinist, writes about "violin-making and fungi"—a topic we had previously posted (here and here) on STC. She accompanies her post with a superb performance of the 1st movement of Haydn's Concerto No. 2 in G Major. Go there and feast both your mind and your ears.
We welcome notices of other microbiological research blogs presented by students.
